Surfing alltop.com recently (my new favorite thing to do online), I ran across a Neuroscience Marketing blog. My attitude towards the effectiveness of advertising and marketing is skeptical at best when it comes to my own consumption, so I found some of the cool facts in this blog not only provocative and interesting but also often shocking – like the fact that even the presence of particular numbers anchors our minds’ attraction to specific prices, explained here.
As a sidenote, there is a name for my distrust and self-exemption from the power of advertising: the Third Person Effect (W. Phillips Davison, 1983). Wikipedia aptly defines this hypothesis as when a person exposed to persuasive communication in mass media sees it as having a greater affect on others than on his or herself. This is not to say either way that media does, or does not have an affect on viewers whether or not they acknowledge it, but we of the media-saturated 21st century generally presume that the bombardment of visual advertising and marketing is more effective on more vulnerable demographics like, say, children.
An interesting example of how our brain structures our reaction to a product and its marketing. The blog discusses how, like wine, our expectations for other consumer goods like software largely shape our reception of certain products. Just as it’s a cultural assumption that wine from California tastes better than wine from North Dakota, the bad press surrounding Vista from the get-go developed negative assumptions for Microsoft that were (and still are) tough to beat. To prove that the distaste for Vista was at least partially due to the impressionability of users, an experiment was conducted in which users tested and asked to rate Mojave (Vista in disguise), the “next” Microsoft OS. Testament to the strength of expectation, 94% percent of the users rated Mojave higher than Vista and gushed about how “cool” it looked and how “great” it functioned Read more about the experiment here – I highly recommend checking it out.
Its funny, that blog post really increased my sympathy for PC and Microsoft. Further, the depiction of Microsoft in the Mac commercials makes me want to reach out and give that poor man a hug. Maybe not the response that Mac was going for, but it definitely gets a reaction. The pervasive smugness among Mac users anchored by the attitude of those commercials has always irked me, to the point that until this summer I adamantly refused to admit that Macs were just, well, better.
Me? Influenced by advertising? Never!
Tags: Advertising, Microsoft
Ahh, but you see, the wonderful “Mojave” experiment isn’t really scientific at _all_ – purely a marketing gimmick.
The largest flaws:
The hardware was controlled. In a perfect world, everyone would be running Vista (”Mojave”) on hardware that it was designed for. In the real world however, people run it on whatever hardware they have. (This is one of the strong points of the Mac – they are able to get the OS perfect for the hardware, as they are able to get the hardware perfect for the OS.) Now, this isn’t to say that Vista won’t run on other hardware – it just won’t run as _well_ as it did during this “experiment”.
The software was controlled. One of the larger flaws, and a major reason Vista slows down, is when you upgrade your Win XP machine to Vista. The leftover files, leftover programs, etc (the “gunk”) does it’s evil work on Vista – and the result is much worse performance than was offered by Microsoft. The other addition that slows computers down are simple day-to-day programs like firewalls, anti-virus, and various pieces of commercial software people need for their work. While I have not seen “Mojave”, I can bet that their was no firewall (other than the Windows one), no anti-virus, and no additional software beyond a blank Vista install.
It also just rankles me the wrong way – having been brough up in an environment that takes the marketing and throws cynicsm straight back at it, I don’t fall into the trap of believing it very easily. It actually has to be right, in order to be smug – and in this case, it’s smug and wrong. Microsoft’s stated Mojave Experiment hypothesis: “If people could see Windows Vista firsthand, they would like it.” The real hypothesis: If we trick people, they will see just how stupid they are.
The end point is that Vista _looks_ pretty, and for the first little while has some useful features, but there are so many little ways that it falls apart after using it, that people have been downgrading, and then telling everyone else not to bother. Vista has bad press, and instead of trying to fix the underlying issues, Microsoft have tried to just pretend that everyone is stupid, and if you didn’t get it to work this well, you must be doing it wrong.
For a much longer look at the “Mojave Experiment” and its flaws, check out http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/07/mojave-experiment-bad-science-bad.html which does a very good job of proving this whole thing wrong (very interesting is the first point on the placebo affect.)